Featured Domains

With .Inc acquisition, we’ll finally see two of the better corporate identifier domains this year.

It’s been a long wait, but two of the best “corporate identifier” top level domain names are coming to the market.

Afilias’ .LLC domain name is in the trademark sunrise period until July 5. A landrush will run from July 9-20, followed by general availability on July 23. Regular retail pricing is in the $30 range.

Another company, Intercap Holdings Inc, has acquired rights to run the .INC top level domain name. It plans to run a sunrise in October, a 7-day early access period in November and also enter general availability in November. .INC domain names will come with a hefty $2,000 suggested retail price.

Neither domain has registrant restrictions, but the price of .INC domains will limit the buyer pool.

A couple of lesser-known corporate identifier domain names have already come to market. .GMBH has about 20,000 names in the zone file and .LTDA has fewer than 1,000.

Brown generally provides a nuanced and well-reasoned opinion in UDRPs, and I’m surprised by the result here.

To be fair, the domain owner didn’t respond. Still, a quick look at the facts of the case strongly suggest this was not cybersquatting and the domain was not registered in bad faith.

It appears the current owner is the original registrant from 1994. Its business was originally called Internet Marketing, Inc., hence the domain name choice IMI.com. It subsequently moved its business to PartnerVision.org.

IMI.com resolves to a page headlined “Internet Marketing Inc a PartnerVision venture”. It says the company has changed domain names and then says “Searching for other IMI Companies, try these:” followed by a list of other companies that use the IMI acronym. These links are clearly not paid links, despite the complainant arguing that they are pay-per-click links leading to companies that compete with the complainant.

Three of the largest applicants for new TLDs are facing a mountain of objections.

Donuts, Amazon, and Google have the dubious honor of having the most objected-to applications for new top level domains.

There were 263 formal objections to new top level domains, and that doesn’t include GAC advice.

Donuts received 55 objections covering 45 unique objections, which means about one out of seven of its 307 applications are facing an objection.

24 of Donuts’ objections are community objections. Groups purporting to represent the gold, band, and ski, among other “communities”, decided to fight the company.

Amazon received 24 objections on 18 unique applications. Half of the 24 objections are community objections, thanks in part of the company’s plans to keep its TLDs closed.

Google, which applied for more domains than Amazon, was hit with 22 objections on 18 unique objections. 9 are community objections and 7 are legal rights objections.

The “our competitors ganged up on us” winner is Fidelity, which applied for only four top level domains but managed to receive 11 objections. Only its .Fidelity application wasn’t objected to. Its .IRA, .MutualFunds, and .Retirement applications received multiple objections from a combination of TIAA-CREF, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Prudential.

The spreadsheet below lists each objection and “decodes” subsidiaries to show applicants such as Donuts. It is sorted by applicant.